Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination Hardcover – November 20, 2014

This is a very well written book. I'm now reading his other book entitled Justifying Genocide. The author is very analytical and balanced. I wish there was a Turkish version. I have been summarizing parts of the book for my mother and some friends who find it highly interesting, but unfortunately can't read it as it is in English.

Even as a well read history buff Turk reading this book thought me some crucial details about our own history especially the unspoken WW2 years

Fascinating take on the influence Ataturk had on the German people after World War I. His bold nationalistic leadership created a new Turkey, and a model for Hitler and the Third Reich during World War II.

Not as grandiose as its title, however, covering what its title promises.

This well conceived book reminds us that Mustafa Kemal was ultimately a world historical figure, whose influence went beyond the Turkish Republic. The blueprint of Kemalism influenced Nasser, and it has inspired many military modernizing regimes, especially in the Middle East. And as Stefan Ihrig demonstrates, Kemalism was also adopted as something of blueprint by Hitler and Company in the aftermath of the First World War.

Now Mustafa Kemal never wrote up a blueprint and had only the vaguest of plans for a Turkish nation state and a republic, so that the blueprint for a Turkish model had to be devised by the Nazis and their allies among the right-wing press corps as they watched the Turkish revolution unfold from 1919 through 1923. The German press, especially the right wing and voelkisch press as well as the Nazis, put together an explanation for Kemal's successful defiance of Western imperialist designs on Anatolia and his construction of a Turkish Republic in the new capital of Ankarra. This became known rather widely in Germany as the Turkish solution.

The Nazi attributed Kemal' s success primary to his bold and courageous leadership of a military revolt against foreign occupation by the Entente, a leadership which was idealized in world historical terms as the manifestation of the Fuehrerprinzip, the cult of the Leader in history or somewhat more philosophically as the triumph of the will to power....Kemal led and the Turkish nation formed out of his leadership. And because Kemal led, good things happened for the Turks when the Entente fell apart and the Turks defended their new state in Ankarra and drove the foreigners out. A new peace was negotiated at Lausanne and the Turkish Republic came free from the humiliations of the Treaty of Sevres. For the Nazis and friends this Turkish solution to German problems with the Treaty of Versailles was obvious: Germany needed a national revolution against Versailles and was waiting only for its heroic Leader to break with decadent regime in Berlin to launch the struggle for national freedom which must be victorious.

There were of course some other requirements. Kemal had made a Turkey for Turks and had chasers the Greeks and others out. Hitler and his mates wanted a Germany for Germans and looked forward to an elaborate ethnic cleansing of Jews, Marxists, Free Masons and others as a necessary stage of national revolution.

Kemal had no real connection with Armenian genocide of 1915/16 But Hitler and the Nazis saw in the Armenian genocide a prerequisite for the ethnic cleansing of Turkey that forged the victory of. the Ankarra revolution, so that part of the Nazi concept of the Turkish solution was an acceptance of ethnic cleansing, perhaps by population exchange, expulsion or removal or by mass murder.

Thus, the Nazis advocated a Turkish solution to Germany by 1922 and took their first steps in that direction in Munich via the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923. While the Kemalist model was supplanted eventually by the Fascist model of Mussolini' s March on Rome, Hitler and an elite group in the Third Reich continued to honor the Turkish solution until 1945.

Ihrig makes a very contribution here...Historians, with few exceptions, have "twinned" Hitler and Mussolini and all but dropped the considerable influence the Kemalist model had on Hitler in 1922/23; the Beer Hall Putsch was to set a revolutionary military government in Munich modeled on Ankarra before marching on Berlin and opening a war of national revolution against the French circulations of the Ruhr...This fits much better with Kemal' s defiance of the Sultan in Constantinople by basing on the Turkish regime in Ankarra before launching the war of liberation against the Greek and British occupation than it does with Mussolini' s March on Rome. But it is also something of a revelation to see the phrases the German Turkish solution developed to explain Kemal' s success: the cult of the Leader, the triumph of the will, purifying the national community, heroic struggle in utterly desperate and tragic circumstances....It is all foreshadowing of the rise and fall of the Third Reich, the Holocaust, Stalingrad and even Hitler alter ego as Wolf, aka MuStafa Kemal.

Interesting approach to a historical figure

Businesslike story teller. Gives both sides of story without taking sides. Painlessly educates without giving you so much detail that it is boring. I am very happy to have chosen it.

Great